


The Sander Valley Werewolf

by Labailey



Category: Horror - Fandom
Genre: Catharsis, Despair, Misery, Sadness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-18 14:21:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29119653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Labailey/pseuds/Labailey
Summary: A quietly desperate man finally escapes his tiny Oregon town and drives south for freedom and a better life, but the dark shape haunting his hometown isn't finished with him.WARNING: Brief reference to self-harm, creepy general tone and werewolf-induced violence





	The Sander Valley Werewolf

I was born in Sander Valley, which is why I hate it. There are times when I miss my friends, or driving to the river well before first light. Scaling the salmon, making three cuts down to the spine and stuffing it with garlic, butter, fresh, dill, and lemon. Sitting in a folding chair by the trailer, wearing Dad's old pea coat and an old hat with earflaps, the frosty air nipping at my hands through gaps in the front pockets. All four of us, drinking and listening to music while the fish's smell turned savory over the open grill. The sound of butter leeching out of the cuts and hissing down into the coals. Yes, I miss some things.

But I think about the broad flat tabletops of the open landscape. Their drops, those soft-looking miniature cliffs dressing an otherwise oppressing flatness under the blank void of Oregon's sky. Swept emptiness of green-tinted brown in what could laughably be called Summer. Dirty frost and whiteout rain throughout the rest of the year, in such a hostile gap of negative space. Just you and the land and nowhere to hide. 

Down uneven inclines where piles of short redbush stand in the slick silver mud of a riverbend. The water so shallow and flat it might as well be a hundred-fifty foot wide creek, barely reaching halfway up my waders in the middle of it, with a rod in my hands. Half expecting a loping, uncomfortably long silhouette to creep into view. Feeling watched from above.

Our local werewolf is probably still a topic of conversation between people who've seen him. Talk used to intuit itself delicately, murmured closely at the bar, never wasted on the mercifully ignorant. Messages of vague caution were given to the latter. 

"I'll drive you, it's a bit late for a walk." 

"I heard people been seeing weird shit out by the bend."

"Ain't worth leaving the I-84 until the trees break. That truckstop's dangerous after dark."

"Man you don't wanna do that, way too easy to get lost down in there."

"Let me give you a ride."

"Hey, I'm going to Tiny's, I'll drop you off."

"It's not out of my way."

"It's too cold to walk."

"I'll drive, I'll drive, I'll drive, I'll drive…"

He left most of us alone. Some guys' stories about seeing him were even funny. Really, not a whole lot of people still around had reason to quarrel with him. But he is feared.

A real, bona-fide werewolf is not some local character. It's something formless and unknowable. The most distressing part of it all is a lack of certainty. If some beast is in the woods going after anybody who crosses it, you can drive it out. Predictable behaviors can be countered and controlled. An aggressive animal is a thing that can be handled.

It's something else to realize, while riding your bike down the lonely highway on a clear winter's day, that something is pacing you a few hundred feet to the left and keeping low. Imagine finding a severed dog's head outside your trailer door in the early morning, deliberately placed in your way. Pissing by a dumpster, drunk late at night in the town where it's supposed to be safe, and seeing what you think is a dog slowly raise up on its hind legs. The too-thin shadow of a torso, an imperceptible difference between head and neck, clawed hangs hanging and the shining mirrors of cat's eyes in the dark mass as it looks at you. As it keeps looking while you back up and return inside the bar. 

Narrow misses? Or just a neighbor in passing? People disappear in Sander Valley. Sometimes in broad daylight.

A decent number of us knew what to do, and what not to do. Offroading in the area, at any time, seemed to set him off. He'd track you and things could go badly. We eventually passed ordinances against offroading, but incidents still happened. You kept outdoor fires small. Didn't make a lot of noise after midnight past the outskirts. Kept animals inside. Left offerings in the right places every so often, just to keep things calm, and left a big one in the graveyard if he seemed unusually active.

No one went to the graveyard at night. Whether they knew about the werewolf or not, whether they were superstitious, religious, secular, it didn't matter. Teenagers and morbid types didn't even go there after the sun went down. The Sander Valley graveyard had an irrefutable atmosphere that you couldn't explain. It didn't even feel safe in the day.

Wasn't impressive. Just a small fenced-off lot with simple stones. Looked like crap. Dirt and dying grass. There was just something about the place. It was hard to even look at it while driving by, but you had to check. You glanced to the third row from the back, fifteen graves to the right. If you saw the glint of liquor bottles, sodden packages, or a killed animal, you stayed the fuck inside at night until one day the offerings disappeared.

Further south in the state stood the trees. Forests crawled all over the soaring hills, wet with rainfall and mists. Not in Sander Valley, where the field of view stretched sideways into forever and something with inhumanly powerful sight pursued impenetrable goals. Trapped by our circumstances, we were unable to hide and unable to leave. Surrounded by our ignorant neighbors in the domain of some ambivalently hostile intelligence.

I think I was always a target. Too many run-ins for too few years, from childhood to teens to my early twenties. Stalked by the werewolf here and again until I finally made enough money to run.

Even without our regional cryptid, Sander Valley would be a purgatory. Its biggest local industry was crystal meth and I refused to live an entire life there. Didn't tell my brother. Didn't tell my friends. It was an escape. I emptied my credit union account after depositing my last check, put a garbage bag of clothes and necessities in my weathered old GMC, and I drove east on the 84 with plenty of daylight.

My plan was to connect to the coastal highways and go south. Washington is for assholes, and I was getting the hell out of Oregon completely. California sounded more my speed. Planned to make it to the Big Sur and figure it out from there.

I was smart enough to pull over to the side of the highway across from the graveyard. I grabbed the new bottle of Dewars from the passenger's seat, opened the driver's side door, and got out. Then… I just stood with my hand still on the open door, rubbing my thumb over the sharp edge of its rusted patch and worked at the peeling rubber lining. That shitty looking graveyard, with its chicken wire fence. The nameless tombstone on the third row.

I didn't want to stop. I didn't want to go in there. And to tell you the truth, when you spend decades getting beaten down without any options, you just bear it and drink. As soon as you get options, well, suddenly your anger gets turned on with your sense of power. All the energy that was whipped out of you floods back in and your engine heats up. I gripped that bottle like a baton, and just threw it.

It smashed on the asphalt, spraying whisky, and the end with the stem bounced off into the ditch between the road and the chickenwire fence. Then I got back in, slammed the door shut as hard as I could, and drove away forever.

The idea had been to be safe. Pay out, and call it square. Make one last offering. But then the moment to leave my offering came, and I decided he could lick it off the Goddamn road if he wanted it that badly. You might understand what it's like for all the traps to come loose, all the barred doors to break, for a link in the chain to loosen enough for you to slip out when you finally have money and an opening at the same time. If you understand how life feels electric when That Place is behind you and the road is in front of you, and nothing can ever make you go back ever again, then you understand why I just threw the fucking bottle. Busted it, instead of taking those few pathetically sad steps to the grave.

It took about forty five minutes to reach the 84 and drive it one last time, until I reached the 97 and turned South.

That was a beautiful moment for me. A simple lefthand turn, opening the last door to the route all the way down. That's all it is, really, to drive for four and a half hours until you hit the I-5 in California. That highway was more symbolic for me than the entire state. More important than Big Sur, which I picked out on a whim. Just something about it. A literal turning point, after the state border where I would salute Mount Shasta on my way to Freedom. The moment where escape would start to feel real. I was hungry for it, my belly and chest aching canyon-wide in need.

This became a fixation, so much so that I didn't pay attention after four hours when my car rolled by that shiny casino above Modoc Point, and the shadows started reaching out from under a low-hanging sun.

Klamath Falls lay ahead, just after nightfall.

Once I reached a quiet stretch between towns and houses, I pulled over to get out and stretch. The sun was finally floating out of sight, and I idled against my truck with more free time then I'd ever had in my life.

Then I heard someone holler.

"HELP!"

I jerked in surprise. Nothing around me but grey tufts, flat grass, and trees in the background. Chiloquin isn't scenic by the highway, and the sheer hill faces don't start cutting out around the road until Modoc. There wasn't anything around except a fence, and some distant barns.

"HELP," the muffled voice again, "I NEED HELP!"

It was somewhere ahead of me, but I couldn't tell where. I jogged uncertainly off the road, calling out to them.

I stopped at the fenceline, and remember yelling, "Hey."

Then the voice repeated "Hey," back to me. I scanned furiously, but couldn't see anything. Heart racing, something kept me from climbing over the fence.

Then I heard ""Hey bu-u-u-u-u-ddy," carry over the wind.

The odd change of tone struck me. It seemed closer. I stood up straight and felt weirdly cold.

After short time hearing nothing except grass rustling in the breeze, the voice yelled for help again. It was definitely closer. Looking from left to right, I started backing away from the fence. 

"HELP," Very loud now, more insistent. Despite my creeping certainty of vague danger, I stopped. What can you do when someone's yelling for help? How can you resist putting your hands up to your mouth, like I did, and yelling back again. 

To ask if they're okay. 

The very instant I called out the word, "okay," I heard a response.

"Youokay?"

It sounded strange. A whining gust of noise, with slurred consonants that didn't sound quite right. 

I'd never spontaneously shivered before that moment, and the experience shocked me. I stayed still, unnerved and confused at whatever I was feeling.

Very, very close, the voice repeated itself with the speaker still nowhere in sight, and no apparent place they could be along that lonely stretch of sickly grass and road.

"Hey bu-u-u-u-u-ddy."

As the darkness took away more and more of what I could see, for some Goddamned reason, I still didn't move.

It seemed like.

Something else stopped moving, too. The certainty was inexplicable, as I'd heard no movement to begin with.

"HELP"

I resumed backing away, trying not to make any sound as my shadow stretching ahead of me reinforced the fact that I was lit up by the headlights, like a theater stage in darkness.

"HELP ME"

As I continued backing away, a warbling scream came out of the darkness with such force that it left my ears ringing. I fell backwards, turned, got up and ran.

The screams continued, increasing in volume and pitch in repetitive blasts. I barely heard the door slam over it.

As I started the car, something barely illuminated moved-- weirdly-- towards the borders of my headlights. I didn't look. I reversed, spun the wheel, missed first and fucked up clutch in my panic several times before the car finally leapt into acceleration and I followed it gear by gear.

It slowly reached ninety miles per hour after thirty seconds. I heard my own heartbeat thudding and gawked out fisheyed at the hurtling road and the black.

It still didn't feel safe as the water finally appeared past the protective barrier on my port side, and the moon poked out from the black clouds. If Sander Valley is the worst of mid-tier middle Oregon, Klamath Falls is the worst of mid-tier southern Oregon. It's an decently sized city full of wretched people with a small-town point of view. They're false and passive-aggressive when sober, bigoted and openly aggressive when drunk, self defeating whether drunk or not, and spend their whole lives dreaming of a day where they get to shoot someone. The West Coast equivalent of midwesterners. I needed gas but had no intention of stopping in the city even if I hadn't just been horribly frightened.

Just after passing a Travel Inn, a faded AMA gas and market sign came into view with a short ways to go before reaching the city. I pumped the brake and pulled in too fast, pulling a tight right and then left turn to stop next to the inside pillar and gas pump while cranking the shift down awfully. I cranked the window level to lower it, put my elbow out to rest, and waited.

Staring absently into the darkness and still unnerved, I failed to realize the gas station had been closed for over an hour.

So when someone approached the driver's side door, I looked back expecting the attendant.

It wasn't.

The shape, this silhouette, was already burned into my memory from a youth wasted in Sander Valley. My scalp felt tight and my cold skin crept watery as I watched the werewolf approach in a sickened state of acceptance. It seemed simultaneously absurd and inevitable, a comically surreal vision that made perfect sense in the tradition of nightmares. The monster came to get me, right on my tail the whole way.

The back end of him would have been fully wolflike, but for the murderous hooks on his feet. All I could see of his chest and head at first was a gathering mass of darkness with shining eyes. The elbows of his shadowy forearms, lanky though they were, jutted out while his foreclaws pointed towards each other under his chest like a bulldog or bear.

He padded forward on all fours into the orange light, squat head swaying on a long neck in front of a large hyena-like back. The werewolf's fur was long, but thin enough to see the wrinkly flesh underneath, and bare webbing of loose skin sagging below his narrow chest to connect its upper arms.

This beast stood on his hind legs, pivoting into a new center of gravity with practiced ease. His massive bulk rose up, exposing a sunken belly and narrow hips below the thing's flabby pigeon-chest. The awkwardly goonish appearance of his body made the smooth movements frightening.

I thought he had a hairless wolf's head until it turned into profile. His muzzle was compressed instead of elongated. A snub-nosed box with a cleft lip and snaggled fangs, expelling breath steaming in the cold of night. His eyes protruded ever so slightly to the side, so that when it looked directly back at me it still seemed to be walleyed. A fanged mouth opened, and a disgustingly long tongue slithered out to absently lick his face and eyeball; a face hairless, red, and shining wet like freshly burned skin, stuck with the soil of the grave.

There he stood, waiting for me to do something. I did not then, and do not now, believe it mattered what. 

He let his mouth hang open, and he vocalized from the back of his throat.

"Yuö●Ay?" He mimicked. The consonant sound was a closing sort of hiccup. The werewolf couldn't talk with its inhuman mouth, but simulated speech nonetheless.

"HEY UUuuuh●ee"

His head inched to the right again, to direct one walleyed black pupil straight at me. It expanded and dilated quickly with excitement.

"HEY UUuuuh●ee"

One clawed foot lifted delicately, and took a step toward me. Without any change in body language, it shrieked more false words.

"HEL●"

My hand moved towards the key with just as much careful deliberation.

"HEL● EE"

I started the engine. He shuffled toward me, barely any faster.

"EYE EE HEL●"

First gear. I took off driving and he fell to all fours, bolting after me and screaming all the while.

"OH ●OD"

"● ●EASE"

"● ●EASE ●OD MNO"

Unfortunately I hit a fence with the big pile of whatever the hell it was behind it, sitting next to the AMA. As I reversed, The horrible glistening face and scrabbling claws came in through the window I hadn't had time to close. 

The truck went backwards, and the werewolf dragged me out the window, gently but firmly bringing me to the ground and squatting over me.

"HEY UUuuuh●ee"

Holding me in place with its body mass, He grabbed my wrist and pulled my clenched hand to he horrible face like he was going to kiss it.

Then, open-mouthed, he worked his exposed lower teeth under my clenched thumb, and closed the top over it.

He bit my thumb off through the bone, just below the knuckle.

I fought the whole time. Flailed as best I could. But anywhere he applied pressure on my body was insurmountable. The memory of being pinned and helpless like a kid comes back to me in my dreams to this day, and the blood coming out of my severed thumb.

He bit the rest of it off at the joint.

He kept biting. Working at my hand and dismantling it, then gnawing at the bone and cartilage while I could still feel everything. Through all that pain, a disgusting pressure and jerking. What strikes me even now is how unhurried he was.

The werewolf slid his hand up my arm to my throat, which he squeezed viciously, and brought his head close to bite my face.

As I remember it, he was suddenly gone. 

Some other people were around me now, a trucker and a prostitute. They asked me questions. I remember him wrapping a belt-- his, I guess-- around my wrist, I think. The sight of my hand, mangled half-gone and dribbling blood on the pavement, replaces almost all other memories.

Whenever they got me to the hospital, I also remember people asking me questions. It's all vague, and I really don't want to clarify anything further of the experience.

It seems that the hooker saw me first, and thought it was a fight, until she attracted her customer's attention to us and they realized some kind of animal was on me. Then the trucker charged in and it 'ran off,' something for which I really can't be appropriately grateful. 

They thought it was a bear, and apparently the description of its condition got park services worried of a potential sickness spreading around in the black bear population. I couldn't help them very much.

The hospital didn't know what to make of my hand healing almost fully, to the point where it regrew all tendons, muscles, and sprouted a couple nubs where my thumb and index finger should have been. 'Miraculous' was a word I heard a lot. I couldn't help them very much, either.

It was a while before I finally got to California, and went from there. I never saluted Mount Shasta, and even if I did it would be with a mauled hand to remind me of the pollution I feel in my spirit and body. I don't feel like I ever escaped, and I never will. It doesn't help that sooner or later, everyone asks about my hand. I just don't talk about it, which can feel good in its own way. I feel like if I don't talk about it, it truly didn't happen, but you eventually need to write something like this to address the fact that it did. My right to leave Oregon was robbed from me. No matter where I actually am.

The question of suicide remains problematic, because I don't know how to kill myself while ensuring that my corpse will be burned immediately so that it can't rise to torment the living.

It feels futile, and I feel empty. Somehow there's no doubt in my mind that the meat of my body will live on corrupted. Perhaps it may finally return to Oregon and roam. Doom is just destiny.

Will it wander from the mountain, to thin inland snow on banks dropped down to the river, to the endless pines bending under wind, to sand carried on air inches above dunes drowned by icy rain? Will it stalk, covered by the sound of waves roaring over sea lion cacophonies along seaside cliffs in the fog? Or will it go back to the flatland limbo of Sander Valley? I wonder where it will walk in that beautifully miserable region stained by sin and shadow. The stolen land of ghosts, where Unquiet Dead haunt and devour.


End file.
